Google Calendar, Gmail and Google Keep are three Google apps that are core to my personal productivity system.

But you know, what helps out even more is the relationships between these three.

So in today's video, I wanna show you how you can get so much more out of these three and by connecting and linking them together.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

How to Link Gmail to Keep Notes

So let's get started.

And we're gonna start with my inbox.

And often I'm dealing with an email here.

And you know, I'd like to take some notes, maybe there's some helpful information here, maybe I've got an existing note that I would like to grab some of this information from.

Well, something that really helps me out is this side panel here on the right, and you can see that we've got some icons here for things like Google Calendar and Google Keep.

Now first things first, if you don't see this sidebar, most likely, it's because you have not hit this little arrow in the bottom right hand corner.

Maybe your website looks or your browser looks a little bit like this.

Come all the way down here to the bottom right hand corner and say show side panel and that will be revealed unto you there.

So if I click on the Keep icon, I've got all of my Keep notes here.

So I can take a look at the relevant note and input the information that I want.

But it gets even better.

Let's say that this is a brand new piece of information but I'd like to have a note linked to this information.

Well, all I need to do here is say, take a note and just before I even begin writing anything, you'll notice that there's an actual link between this spring conference ideas and the email that I'm writing here.

So I'm just gonna say, new note here as an example, I'm gonna hit Done.

The great thing is that no matter where I am, let's go into Keep itself.

Here's that new note.

I've got that link, I can just click on that link and now in a new tab, I'm gonna go directly to this email.

I've got a connection between that note and going back to this email.

So no matter what I do with this email, if I archive it, if I send it to a different label or a different folder, I've got a link.

So as I'm fleshing out these notes, maybe I'm adding a bunch of notes related to that email, I can always go back and revisit it here.

If I wanna kill that link, well, I can just hit the X.

If I never wanna have that link, go back, I can do so there.

But let's look at another way

How to Link Gmail to Google Calendar

In which we can connect information from a Gmail into this time Google Calendar.

So in this case, let's say this is something that I wanna create a meeting about in this email example, someone would like to set up a meeting with me and we've already got part of the agenda listed here.

So why do I wanna copy and paste this or write it all out again, why don't I just create an event from this?

Well, if we go up here to these three dots, we've got a number of other options available to us and one of them is create event.

So if I select Create event within any email that is open, what it's gonna do is open up a new tab within Google Calendar, it's gonna input the subject of that email up top here, and the contents of that email automatically in the description.

And in fact, it's even added that individual over here.

I can actually just hit save and create this meeting, I should really take a look at the date and the time first, but I can hit save and create that meeting almost immediately.

Now, of course, I can change the title, I can add some more information down here as well, but in just a few clicks, one click to be exact, I can be in here and be ready to set up that particular meeting.

So those are a couple of ways that you can get information out of Gmail into both Keep and Google Calendar.

How to Link Google Calendar to Keep Notes

Now let's stick with Google Calendar for a second.

I'm gonna discard this particular meeting.

I'm gonna go back to this one here.

So I'm here within Google Calendar, and perhaps I wanna link some of the information here with my notes.

So for example, let's say I'm interviewing someone later today and I wanna write out some of the job interview questions.

Well, if I open up this invitation here, I obviously don't wanna add it to the description, because perhaps the person I'm interviewing is a part of this invitation.

I don't wanna give away the questions or my personal notes in advance, but with this event already open, I'm gonna come back over here to this side panel and hit Keep.

And very similar to what we saw in Gmail, if I say take a note, I've got that link again.

So here, maybe I've got, question one, question two, question three, I've got a bunch of questions.

I'm gonna label this job interview questions here, perfect.

So I've got some of my job interview questions and perhaps I'm gonna keep adding to this.

I don't wanna be in here all of the time within the calendar, I'm gonna go about the rest of my day maybe throughout the week, I'm gonna come back here and add to these job interview questions or revise these job interview questions.

But if I wanna go back to that particular calendar invite maybe I've forgotten who these interview questions are for, I can select that and it's gonna bring me directly back to this particular invite.

So some cool new ways as to making a relationship between Keep in Gmail, and also Keep and Google Calendar.

How to View Keep Reminders in Google Calendar

But it gets even better.

And we're gonna look at another relationship between Google Calendar and Keep.

So let me close this out here for a second.

Within Google Calendar, this is where I spend most of my day, this is where I have all of my appointments, all of my events, I even manage the majority of my to dos here within my calendar.

But let's go back to this interview example here again.

What if I wanna review those questions in advance?

What if I wanna review these job interview questions, just to refresh my memory or to revise them one last time?

Well, within Google Keep what we can do, of course, is add a reminder.

So if I go in here and add a reminder, let's say I wanna pick a particular time.

If the interview is at 10:30am, I wanna be reminded of these notes at 10:00am.

I'm gonna hit save.

So now I've got my reminder here.

If they have desktop notifications turned on, I'm gonna get a reminder here within the browser, I may also get a reminder on my mobile phone.

But it gets even better if I go back to Google Calendar as long as you have reminders enabled, as long as you're viewing the reminders calendar here.

And I'm just gonna refresh this page so that we can see it here.

What's gonna happen is, there we go. There are my job interview questions showing up as a reminder here within Google Calendar.

So if I click on this, it's gonna remind me first of all, but if I click on this, I'm gonna have those job interview questions waiting for me.

Don't forget reminders that you set here with Google Keep automatically link with your Google Calendar account.

As long as you have your reminders calendar enabled, you can hide them if you want.

See those little purple reminders that I had, I'm gonna enable them again, you can see them here, I've got another one here that may be related to this team meeting here, this particular note as well.

How to View Keep Notes in Google Calendar or Gmail

So that can be very helpful too.

But let's go one step further here, because I want you to show that it actually keeps the link between some of the notes that we've created over here, and the things that we've done on the calendar itself.

So you'll remember that when I created that note, let's open up a new one here.

I'm gonna open this up.

And if I say take a new note, and let's just say this is a new visit client note just so we can see it there.

I'm gonna say done.

I've got that link, it's creating that link because I'm creating it here while it's open.

New clients note how about that?

Let's make sure we get the title correct here.

But what I wanted to show you here is that when I'm back on the calendar, here I've got my notes here, I don't see anything too special, it's just ordering it in the way that I've entered it here.

But if I open up this calendar event, what you're gonna see is looking at that, related.

That's actually gonna jump to the top.

So even if I took this note, and then I took hundreds of other notes, whenever I open up this event within Google Calendar, if there's a link, this is gonna jump to the top, I'm gonna be able to find it later on that much easier as long as I have this side panel open.

Let's go back and look at that example with the interview one.

If I open this one up, again, related, there's my job interview questions.

It wasn't the last one I created, this was the last note I created, but it knows that it's related so that is gonna pop up in the side panel as well.

Now the last thing that I wanted to share

How to Add Keep Notes to Anything

With you today here is how you can actually add a Google Keep link to absolutely anywhere, not just Gmail or Google Calendar you can add it absolutely anywhere.

So here, if I open up, let's say I wanna link back to this particular note here.

Whenever you have a note open within Google Keep, what you can do is come up here and copy, you can copy the information in that link.

Now what I can do is I can go back to absolutely, I've already got one here in that particular note, let's open up this one here.

I can go to anywhere and paste that link.

Now it doesn't have to be within a Google app like I'm showing you here, I gotta save this one, but I'm just gonna use this as an example.

If I come back here, here, I've got that link.

If I click on it, what it's gonna do is in a new tab, it's gonna open up that particular note.

So isn't that fantastic?

No matter where I am, I mean, I could be pasting this into a Google Drive document or a PDF or something like that, it's gonna bring it back to this particular note.

So it may leave you with a bit of an ugly URL.

This is a bit of a workaround, you could say it's not the most prettiest link, but of course, you can do that here by pasting that where you like it.

I'd love to hear from you next.

Number one, what was your favorite tip from today's video?

And number two, did I miss anything?

Is there another way that you can create a connection between these or other Google Apps?

Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

PDF documents are a crucial file type for your business or your everyday use.

Whether you're using it for contracts and agreements, maybe for marketing materials or newsletters.

I'm sure that you are using PDF documents on a daily basis.

So in today's video, I wanna give you five great reasons for using a PDF editor.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And in today's video, I'm using PDFelement by Wondershare.

If you would like to learn more and try PDFelement for yourself, you can see the link in the description below.

So let's get started with reason number one.

PDF Editor

And you know what? It's right in the name, you can edit any PDF document.

So let's take this one as an example.

Let's say I've got a newsletter here and you know, the only thing I have is the copy from a few years back and I don't have the original file type, I don't have the Word document, all I have is the old PDF.

So what am I gonna do?

Well, I'm gonna open it up in my PDF editor and here I can come in here, I can change the date.

Let's say for example, I wanna make that 2020, in this case.

Maybe I come down here and I say, oh, we're only gonna have 32 meetings this year.

So let's delete that and put 32, you can see that it keeps the same formatting, the same coloring and everything.

And maybe I wanna get rid of this image because that image is dated as well.

Let's go and replace that image really quickly here.

I'm gonna go up to (mumbles) images, oh, here we go.

Let's replace it with this clock.

And boom, it's seamless.

There it is, it fits in with my PDF documents.

So even if you don't have the original file, or you can't get the original file from someone else, it is so easy to edit any PDF document.

Reason number two, why you should consider a PDF editor is that you can convert any PDF to an editable file.

So I'm gonna look at this one here, as an example here.

This one is mostly text based.

But let's say that I need to share this with someone else, who's actually gonna do most of the editing on their end.

They're the ones who wants to revise this press release.

And I don't know, if they have a PDF editor, or if they have any experience, they would like this in a Word file.

Well, if I come over here to convert, you can see I can convert this PDF to a variety of popular file types.

I can also convert it just to text or to an image itself.

But let's go to Word and let's convert this particular one to Word.

Let's say no, I don't care about saving this one in particular, we just wanna convert this one to Word.

So I'm just gonna say underscore Word copy, just so we know that we can find it.

I'm gonna hit Save and pretty quick.

I mean, this is a pretty short document, so it didn't take very long for it to convert it there.

Let's pop over to Word and let's open it up.

Let's see how we did, it looks pretty good.

Looks pretty good.

You may notice a few minor formatting adjustments.

The spacing may be slightly different than what you're, than what you just saw in the PDF document.

But for the most part, the formatting, the layout, et cetera, is all the same.

So now I can send this file to my colleague or to the person I'm working with.

And they can go ahead and edit it with a program that they are more comfortable with, in this case, Word.

Alright, the third reason why you should consider using a PDF editor is from a collaboration standpoint by the ability to both comment and add notes to a document.

Collaboration

So let's say for example, here I am, and as I'm reviewing this, I wanna add some notes for someone that I'm working with and I say, you know, this picture has got to go.

I'm gonna click on this little sticky note here.

I'm gonna click on it here and I'm gonna say, can we use something else here?

I'm gonna leave a little question mark here.

Now anyone can come in here that I give access to and they can just hover over it and they can see my note.

They can change it themselves, or they can provide me with some feedback.

I can use this highlighting notion here and I can just highlight maybe a section over top of it.

I'm gonna double-click on that and say, let's get the yes from the client, first, maybe I wanna make sure that we get permission to use a particular name here.

So again, anyone can come in here, double-click, see my comment, you can collaborate and add comments as you're working with other members of your team.

Alright now, number four, I think is really crucial for working with a PDF editor.

And actually, it's a big reason why I wish I had started using a PDF editor many, many years ago much earlier than I ended up doing so.

And that is adding customizable and fillable fields.

So this time, I'm gonna go up to Form and here you can see that we can add things such as a textbox, a checkbox, radio button, drop-down fields.

All these types of fields that are fillable, think of how many times you've been sent a PDF form and how convenient it was that you can actually fill it in, you didn't have to print it off and fill it in by hand, you could just fill it in directly.

So in this case, I'm gonna use this set, text field one, for example.

And let's say I want them to, you know, add their full name at the bottom of this PDF.

I'm actually going to come over here to edit and just add the textbox itself here at the beginning.

So maybe I want them to add their full name.

So I'm gonna add it there, I can now adjust it, I can drag it up here.

There we go.

Click and drag, actually like this little crosshairs that they include, so I can line it up exactly.

So now when this person goes to use this particular document, this is going to be a fillable field, right?

And you've seen that before.

I can just come in here and oh, yeah, my name is Joe Smith.

Perfect, I can keep filling out that form.

So think of how many things that you use as part of your day to day, or a part of your business where you're needing someone to fill something in.

How convenient it is if they can do so directly within the PDF, something that is essential in any good PDF editor.

Now the fifth and final reason why I think you should consider using a PDF editor, has to do with protection.

So I'm gonna kind of get to come up here and select the Protect tab.

Now in this case, I could add a password if I wanted to, if I wanted to require a password to open up this particular PDF document.

I could also set some other permissions such as allowing them to print or allowing them to make changes.

But in this case, I wanna show you something in addition to that, and that is actually blocking out or hiding specific pieces of sensitive information.

So let's say for example, in this particular document, let's say that this BCTFD is the name of a client and I wanna share everything else in this document but I don't wanna share the specifics of the client, maybe I'm, you know, showing some work to a potential client or something along those lines.

So I just wanna block out this BCTFD.

What I can do is I can come up here, select redaction, and then start highlighting things that I wanna redact.

But you know what many PDF documents are pages and pages in length.

I mean, what if this is 50 pages in length?

Well, that's just not gonna do.

So let me delete this redaction here, I'm gonna show you a much easier way to do so.

In this case, I'm actually gonna search for the words that I wanna block out.

So let me type in BCTFD, I gotta hit Search.

And it's gonna find occurrences of that everywhere in the document and remember, if this document was 50 pages long, there might be hundreds of references to this client everywhere.

I can either choose them individually here if I want.

I'm gonna select this first one which is gonna select them all.

You can see that they're now all highlighted.

They've all got this little red around them.

The last step in this case is I'm gonna say confirm or apply this redaction, it's gonna give me a warning just to make sure that I wanna go and proceed with this.

I'm gonna hit OK.

And now you can see I have blacked out references to this particular customer, this particular string of words, I can now save this PDF, I can send it to that client or to other people, and be sure that they won't see the client name or maybe I wanna hide some financial information, whatever the case may be, you can do that with a PDF editor.

So I hope I've given you some good reasons to consider using a PDF editor as a part of your day to day.

Again, if you would like to use the exact features that I've shared with you today, here, you can try them for yourself by using PDFelement.

You can find a link to their website in the description below.

Thank you so much for watching today's video and remember being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

Are you tired of writing the exact same response to the questions you receive on a regular basis, in email?

Wouldn't it be great if you could have a template so that you could send all of the information that you need to, without writing it out every single time?

Well in today's video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know about Gmail Templates.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

And to get started, we're gonna need to go up to settings, and hit settings again.

Now until recently, Gmail Templates used to be called Canned Responses, but much of the functionality has remained the same.

Here within settings, we wanna go all the way over to the right-hand side and select the Advanced tab.

Now templates are already at the very top of my screen because I've already enabled it, but by default, all of the options within the Advanced tab are disabled.

So you might actually wanna take a few minutes and review some of the other great features that are available here within Gmail.

So be sure to enable templates, and before you leave make sure to come down here and hit Save Changes, so that they are applied.

So now that templates are applied, when we are either replying to a message, forwarding a message, or composing a brand-new message, we have a special feature available to us.

So let's take a look at this example email.

Let's say I'm receiving a question from someone here but I wanna give a polite response that I'm not interested at this time, and I don't wanna waste the time writing it out myself.

So I'm gonna select the reply button here, and then in the bottom right-hand corner, under these three dots, under more options, I'm gonna click that.

And you can see at the top, I've got an option called Templates.

So I've got a few different things I can do here.

I've already created a few templates already.

Insert a template, I'm gonna show you that in a second, but we can also save a new draft or delete an existing template.

Well let's start with the template that I've already created.

This one called Sorry, Not Interested.

I'm gonna click that, and immediately I've got my pre-packaged response.

Here's the three sentences that I'd like to send.

I can hit Send and get on with my next email or get on with the rest of my day.

So you're probably thinking at this point, well how do I create my own template, Scott?

I wanna create something from scratch.

Well it's pretty simple.

Whether you're replying or whether you're composing a new message, just start with a blank message.

Now let's create something super quick and simple.

I'm gonna say thank you for reaching out, but I'm not interested at this time.

Take care.

So here I've got my message, but just before I hit send, if I wanna save this as a template, I need to come back down to more options, come down to templates, and I'm gonna say save draft as template.

Now you're still gonna see my existing templates here, because the first one is to overwrite an existing template.

Maybe I want to update an existing template.

Well then I would select which one I would like to save over.

But in this case, I wanna save a brand-new one.

So I'm gonna say save as new template, and here by default, it's gonna input the subject line.

Now that's important, because if you're composing a message from scratch, the template name will be the subject line in that case, but in this example I'm just gonna say not interested.

That's gonna be the name of this particular template.

I'm gonna hit save.

And now I can use this again and again.

If you just wanna test it out, you can come back here to more options, select templates, and there it is.

Not interested, I can boom.

I can use it here, I can use it absolutely anywhere.

But remember, this can go beyond just simple text responses, or simple text-based emails.

If I come down here, I'm gonna select one of the templates I already created earlier, called Learn More About Simpletivity.

I'm gonna select this one.

And here you can see, you can add formatting, I've got a few links here, I've even got an image.

I've got a picture that I've included in this particular template.

So think of the examples in your life where people are asking for information or asking questions, and maybe you wanna send them a pricing list.

Maybe you wanna send them a few samples of your work, or sample images.

Maybe you've got links to videos that you regularly send out.

You can compose a very lengthy email, complete with formatting, complete with all of this information, and just have it ready to go as a template.

Now, the last thing that you should know is that if you want to delete a template.

We're gonna go back up here, and come down to the bottom option.

If you wanna delete a template, you can go ahead and do so, and select which one that you would like to.

Now before you do so, once you've selected it, it will give you one last chance, and no, no, no, no, I don't wanna delete it just yet.

So I'm gonna say cancel.

The last example I wanna show you here is that when we are composing a new message, so let's say I'm composing a message from scratch.

Again, we're gonna have our templates available to us as well, but I just wanna show you that if I use this Learn More About Simpletivity template again, you can see how the name of that template will show up as the subject line.

So keep that in mind if you're not just going to be using templates for replies, or for forwarding emails, that that default name will show up as the subject line.

Of course you can always come in here and edit it if you like, but that can be handy if you wanna save some, even more time, when sending out these types of messages.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today's video and I hope you start saving a lot of time by using Gmail Templates, formerly known as Canned Responses.

I would love to know how you plan to use such templates in your business, in your day-to-day, or maybe in your personal life.

Be sure to leave your comments in the section down below.

Thank you again for watching and remember being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.

If you use Evernote, you're probably sick of managing hundreds, if not thousands of notes and all of your notebooks.

Well, in today's video, I wanna show you five tips to help you be more efficient and effective with managing all of that reference material, meeting agendas, thoughts, whatever you capture here in Evernote, I want you to do it faster.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.

Tip 1 Create Note Links

So let's get started with tip number one and first off, we are gonna take a look at creating note links and what that is is creating links between one or more notes here within your Evernote notebook.

So in this example, I've got a link here that says review new artwork for Google ad. And if I click on that, it's gonna take me directly to another note that I have here within Evernote.

This can be really handy if you want a high-level note in one area of your notebook and maybe you wanna drill down to some more details with other notes within Evernote.

So how do we create this?

Well, first of all, let me delete this for an example and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start with the note that I want to reference.

If I right click on any note, I'll get this menu and I want to choose Copy Internal Link.

By selecting that, I've copied that link to the clipboard and now I can go up to whatever note I want.

Let's go back to this one as an example and I'm just gonna hit paste.

Now, you'll notice that I don't get a lot of gobbledygook like you see up here like you would typically see if you were just pasting a web URL.

But no, this link is clean. In fact, this link is the title of that particular note.

So now I can just click on it and go directly to that note elsewhere within my Evernote account.

It can be really, really helpful.

Tip 2 Create Table of Contents

Let's stay with making these connections and next up what I wanna do is show you how to create a table of contents because maybe you'd like to see a summary of a number of notes within a single note.

Now, you're probably used to managing your notes within a notebook and you probably have a lot more than what I have listed here in my sample account, but maybe you don't wanna manage all of those notes within tags or within their own dedicated notebooks.

Maybe you just wanna reference let's say three or four different notes. So in this case, what we're gonna wanna do is multi-select.

So on the left-hand side here, I'm gonna select these three notes here. I'm just gonna hold down Control on my keyboard and you can see I get a bit of a snapshot of what those notes contain here, but down below the great thing is is that I've got a number of additional options available to me.

And in this case, what I'm gonna select is create table of contents note.

Now, just before I do this, I wanna make sure that you're aware this is not going to delete or remove or change the location of these three existing notes, but it's actually gonna create a new note.

So if I select this, what's gonna happen, I'm gonna scroll up to the top and here you see I have a new note which is called table of contents. But when I click on it, now I've got note links directly to those three notes. It's even added numbered bullet points here to the left. So I can click on any one of them and go directly to that given note.

Now, you probably wanna change the title of this from table of contents to something more relevant, but this can be especially helpful when you are creating for example a meeting agenda and maybe you've got five or six or seven items that you wanna talk about, but you don't wanna list them all within the agenda here. Maybe you just want the bullet point name and then you or members that you're working with can drill down and select that link and then go to the desired note.

So there's one another thing I wanna show you here when it comes to multi-selecting notes here. And we're not talking about just applying tags to different notes. If let's say I take notes one, two, and three, again I'm gonna click on one and then I'm gonna hold down Control to multi-select. I'm gonna add three in this case, but you can actually merge your notes as well.

Maybe for example I've been taking notes about the same idea or the same thought or topic at different times, but after review I've realized you know what, these shouldn't be in three separate notes. These should actually be in the same note. So now that I've got the three selected here, I'm gonna select the merge button and what this is gonna do

Tip 3 Merge Notes

It's gonna take those three notes and put them into a single note.

Now, you can see that there's a header here that is gonna give us the name of the note up here. It's gonna also say the author, who created this note in the first place.

So you can see what is going on and the separation between these three notes. So now I've got them all contained in one note. I don't just have to lump them in within the same notebook. I can see them all right here.

Now, there's one word of warning with merging. There is no capability of undoing this action. So for example, I can't just click on this and say, well, let's go back or actually no, I didn't mean to do that. Can we hit undo?

If I go up here to Edit and say Undo, it's not going to undo it. So before you select that merge button, make absolutely sure that you wanna combine those notes together. But when you do, you're gonna have them more conveniently displayed to you in a single note.

Tip 4 Shortcut Keys

All right, let's move on to tip number four and this is gonna save you an awful lot of time and that has to do with shortcuts and hotkeys.

So if we go up here to the top of our menu and if we select Tools, we wanna then select Options. And when the Options dialogue opens up, we wanna go about halfway down and select shortcut keys.

Now, first off, you're gonna wanna review this and see the number of actions you can perform just by using these shortcut keys. I think probably the most obvious one or the most helpful one will be the first one, create a new note.

But if you don't like this particular key combination, you can just delete it and create your own combination you can use. Maybe there's something a little more convenient to you.

But the other bonus of using global shortcut keys is that you can use these as long as the desktop version of Evernote is open. So you don't have to be viewing this. As long as it's open in your taskbar in your system tray as it states here, you can use these shortcut keys and they will be applied.

Let me show you just a quick example of this one in particular Control + Alt + N. So if I come out of here and just say Control + Alt + N, boom, exactly, I'm gonna have a fresh new note that I can start editing right away. So much easier than always having to come up here and select new note depending on where my mouse is and depending on how many monitors you may be using at any given time.

Tip 5 Advanced Syntax

Now, my fifth and final tip today also has to do with saving time and this one in particular has to do with searching notes, but using some advanced syntax so you can narrow down your search and get to the note that you are looking for.

You're probably already familiar knowing that by typing in a keyword here, you can quickly find something. If I say, I don't know, let's say the word review for example, I'm gonna find every single note that has the word review in it somewhere. Not just the title, but within the note itself.

But what if the note that I'm searching for I know it has review in the title and that's the only one I want. Well, we can use some special features here. In this case, we can use the term intitle. So if I use the term intitle and now I enter in the word, I'm gonna say review, I only get one search result because this is the only one right now that has review in the title. I can narrow it down that much more.

Let me show you two more that I find very, very helpful. You might be using a checklist for some of your Evernote processes and some of the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis. Here's my office supplies list. If you wanna look for things that have a to-do list or a checklist, what you can do is use the syntax todo and then you can choose either true or false. So if I type in the word true, what it's gonna bring back is any of my notes that has at least one of the checkboxes checked off. Here I've got three in this particular case. So this is the only note that's coming back to me.

If I back up and say todo false, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna get a few different notes come back. I'm still gonna get this one because in this case, it's gonna show me every note that has a checkbox, at least one checkbox that is unchecked and that's the case here. I've got a few other documents here that have things that are unchecked. So I can search just by the status of the checkbox.

The last one that I wanna show for you here is created or updated. So if you're looking for something and you say, I know I created it within this timeframe, you can type in the word created, then start with day. Now, if you say day, it's gonna bring back everything that is today and I like how Evernote always shows you in sort of an easy-to-read manner as to what you're actually searching for.

But don't stop just there. If I say day minus three for example, it's gonna bring back everything that's been created since three days ago which in this case was November 26. So you can get really granular here. You can use created. You can also use updated because those are two different things of course what you're searching on here to be more granular and get specific with what it is you are searching for.

Well, I hope you enjoyed those five tips to get more out of Evernote and especially to help you save time. Now, I'd love to learn from you next what are some of your time saving tricks or techniques for getting the most out of Evernote. Be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thanks again for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

You probably have a number of goals that you want to reach in the coming year, whether that's getting more exercise, reading more books or perhaps just spending more time with friends.

Well, Google Calendar has an excellent way to help you reach all of your goals, and so today I want to show you everything you need to know about setting and tracking your goals within Google Calendar.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let's start off with our mobile app because that's the only place you can go to start or create a goal.

But as I'm gonna show you, you can see and edit and even change your goals within the desktop app. So I'm gonna be switching back and forth as a part of today's video.

So to get started, all you need to do is hit the plus button in the bottom right-hand corner. Now, you're probably used to this, to creating a new event or maybe adding a reminder, but we want to select that little flag to create a new goal.

And right off the bat, Google has given us a number of suggestions including exercise, building a skill, spending time with family and friends, maybe just me time, or organizing your life.

Now, if none of these apply directly to you that's okay, you can choose a custom goal. But Google does a good thing to get us started at least in the right direction.

So I'm gonna start with exercise and you can see it's gonna ask me which exercise I'd like to set as my goal but I could select Custom down below. So you can choose absolutely anything that you want.

So in this example I'm gonna choose walking. I want to get out and enjoy a walk more often. So I'm gonna select Walk. The next option it gives me is how often, and again you can be very customized with this. You can choose more options here but it's giving me a number of things to consider.

I think five times a week would be great. So I'm going to select that option. Lastly, how long, how long of a walk would I like to go on. In this case let's say I'd like to aim for 30 minutes as a part of my walk.

Last question actually is the best time. Morning, afternoon, evening, or should I just try and fit it in whenever I can. Well, I'd like to do it in the afternoon so I'm gonna tell Google Afternoon.

So now I see a summary of my selections, five sessions a week of 30 minutes in the afternoons. Now, I could select more options at this point and if I do, you can see that I have a few more things I can change here.

By default, it's gonna give me a reminder 30 minutes before. I can delete that if I want to. I can also toggle on or off smart notifications so that's before and after my sessions to help me prepare but also track because of course tracking your progress is so important in reaching your goals.

And I can also change my default color. And I'm gonna do it right now. I'm gonna select Tomato, I'm gonna select that red just so it stands out more on my calendar. I'm gonna hit Save.

I'm returned to this screen here, and the very last thing that we need to do is hit that check mark here. When I hit that check mark it's gonna take a few seconds to find the best time for my goal and actually schedule those goals into my calendar.

So now it takes us back to our calendar and you can see it's already included a walk later today. At the bottom it tells me that the first time is today at 2 p.m. Does this time work for you?

Now, I could select Adjust time if I wanted to, and you can adjust any of the times. Not just the first time or the first schedule. But in this case that looks fine to me. So I'm gonna say Looks fine.

And if I scroll over here to the right, you can see that it's included a walk in the next few days so that I can achieve that five walks per week. But what I love about this is if I scroll here to Wednesday, you can see it's not 2 p.m.

It's actually worked around my existing schedule. Let's jump over to the desktop version so we can take a look at this a bit closer.

So here, in the desktop version, of course we're gonna see exactly what we saw in the mobile version. If I scroll over to the next week you can see I've got my walk scheduled in there as well.

But this is what I was talking about is that it's actually learning what I have booked already and it's going to schedule around that. So it could see that tomorrow I can't go for my walk at 2 p.m. so it's gonna have to adjust itself here.

But it gets better than that. Because let's say that something is scheduled for me. Let's say someone invites me to a meeting or maybe I need to take a meeting at a time where one of my goals is already scheduled.

So let's take a look at this Thursday, for example. And I'm gonna input a sample meeting. I'm just gonna say Sample meeting here and I'm gonna make it an hour, I'm gonna say from two to three.

So you can see before I hit Save it's gonna be in conflict with this goal. So let's find out what happens. I'm gonna hit Save here. And in just a moment, look at that! It automatically adjusted my goal.

It took that existing goal of walking at 2 p.m. and it bumped it up to 1 p.m. because it knew that there was a conflict now. Maybe there is something else I would like to do here.

Now, again, at any time I could say you know what, that's still not gonna work. I'd rather not walk immediately after my lunch here with Mike, I'd like to have it a little bit later in the day.

So I'm gonna click and drag it to 4 p.m. So you can edit your individual goals as well, right? And if I need to delete something, you know what, this one isn't going to work here, I can click on it and say, you know what, let's just get rid of that one.

I can't make it that day. I'm gonna delete it. So you can edit and change your goals here within the desktop version. You just can't add or start a new goal from the desktop version. You do need to do that from the mobile site.

One thing I want to show you here as well is that if you click on the goal, let's say for today, and let's say I've done it already, you're gonna see this little Did It option here.

So I'm gonna say yeah, I did this walk today, I wanna cross it off. So I'm gonna select Did it, it's gonna cross it off letting me know that I've accomplished that goal, and then I can keep on with my day.

So now back in the mobile view you can see that can still have that one crossed off. If I click on it, you can see that I can change it back. At the bottom I could say Mark as not done if I hit it by mistake.

But what I really wanna point out here is how goals within Google Calendar also tracks your progress. So here you can see that it says that I've done one out of five this week. And I've got this little circular graph that's going to let me know.

Now, if I scroll to the left something that is a little funny is that it's always gonna show you the last four weeks. And so even though I started this goal today, it's actually going all the way back to November 10th, which is a little odd since I didn't begin my goal back there, but I think just by default what it's going to do is always show you the goals of the last four weeks.

So you can track your progress here as well. But if I need to make adjustments to my goals, I can do that too. If I go up to the top and hit the Edit icon, I'm back into sort of a similar view here but this time I can actually click on five sessions a week.

I can say you know what, that was maybe a little too much, I'd like to change it to three sessions a week but I'd also like to change it to maybe one hour in length. So you don't have to start fresh every single time.

You don't have to delete something from the beginning. You can go in and make those adjustments along the way.

I'd love to hear from you next. Have you used Google Calendar goals? If so, what types of things have you used it for? And if not, I would encourage you to test it out.

No matter what your goals are, see how Google Calendar can help you reach them. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Wouldn't it be great if you could do one action within Trello, and then a multiple number of actions could be applied? For example, what if I could take this task, right here, and drag it over into this new list, and then have it automatically apply a due date, a checklist, and myself, just like it did right there?

Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you how to do exactly that. I wanna show you everything you need to know about Butler automation.

Now, earlier this year, Trello gave Butler to absolutely everyone, including free users, or those just using the basic version of Trello. The great thing about this is that it actually doesn't count as one of your Power-Ups, so you can use Butler in conjunction with a number of other Power-Ups, including Custom Fields.

So let's jump right in and get comfortable with the Butler interface.

Automation Tips

In order to do so, you just need to select the Butler button, which appears in the top right-hand corner of all of your Trello boards.

Now the very first screen that you're gonna see is called Automation Tips, and Butler is going to try and give a few suggestions, based on your behavior as to the types of things that you might want to include.

But I'm gonna go directly to Rules, because Rules is gonna be the most important area, and probably the area that you most frequent when creating automated actions here within Trello.

Now, a little later on, I'm gonna show you the differences between the five different automation categories here within Butler, but Rules is at the top for a reason, because Rules are gonna be things that are applied based on other actions.

Creating a New Rule

So here you see a rule that I just performed. It says, "When a card is added to the list 'In Progress' by anyone, set the due date to 48 hours, add the 'Follow Up' checklist to the card, and join the card." And you saw that happen in real time.

But let me walk you through creating a new rule from scratch. I want you to be comfortable with this interface, and not be intimidated by all of the many options that are available to you.

So first things first, we need to start with a trigger. This is gonna be the cue that other actions, or other things should be applied.

So we're gonna select Add Trigger, and here we are given a number of different options. Now they're categorized in a few different groups. Movement, as in card movement, or adding a card to a board or list. Card Changes, this would include things like adding or removing labels, attachments, members, et cetera. Date-based, whether that's a due date, or entering in information on a card that already has a due date. Maybe if a checklist is added, or if a checklist is completed. Card Content would include things like adding a comment within a particular card. And Fields is all about Custom Fields. Remember I mentioned, you can use this with your own Custom Fields, which makes it that much more powerful.

But in this case, let's start with Card Movement. And just to give you a bit of an idea of how this interface works, you can see they have tried to list it in such a way that you can just sort of read it out.

So, "when a card is added to the board by me," that could be the trigger, and then we would hit the green plus button over here. But we have so many more options than that. If you hover over almost any one of these fields, you can see I can change "added to" to "created in," "emailed into," "moved into," "moved out of." And instead of me, it could be "by anyone," or "by anyone except me." In some cases, you may need to even click on some of these fields just to show you the other options available to you, but I don't want you to be intimidated by this. There's a lot of options, but that gives you that much more power as to what you want it to do.

So let's create a simple one here together. Let's recreate something similar to what I showed you at the beginning. So, "when a card is added to," and added does mean created, copied, emailed, or moved into. If you wanna be more specific, I can choose one of those other options. But I'm gonna leave it at added.

So I'm gonna say when a card is added to a particular list, in this case I'm gonna choose "Ideas," and I really don't care if it's added by me. Actually, you know what, I'm gonna stick this one with me, 'cause I wanna make sure that I get added to this card. So I'm gonna say added by me. Now, I have to go over to the right and hit the green plus button. That's actually gonna add the trigger.

If I scroll up to the top, you can see the Trigger, there is the trigger that we just created. Now step two is to perform an action. Now one or more, and the great thing about Butler is that you can layer action upon action upon action.

So let's add three actions in this case. First things first, I wanna add a due date, so I'm gonna select the Dates option here, and you sometimes may have to read through a number of the options to find exactly what you are looking for. But I'm gonna choose this second one, I wanna set the due date.

I don't want it to set to now, so I'm gonna click on this, and wow, I've got a lot of options available to me here. But it looks like this second one is what I'm looking for. I wanna set it to 48 hours from right now. If I click on this clock, I could be really specific and actually say what time of day. But I'm gonna click off that, I'm gonna leave it at 48 hours from when that card is moved, and I'm gonna select the plus button.

Now it should be noted, we actually have not added that action yet, we've just specified the time. Set due date to 48 hours. I still need to come over here and hit the green plus button.

If we scroll up, you can see that action has now been applied, but let's don't stop there. Remember, we can add as many actions as we like. Next up, I'm gonna go to Members, because I want to join this card. I don't wanna waste my time going into the card, and adding myself, and having to remember every time.

So I'm gonna choose this first one, join the card. I'm gonna go all the way over here to the right, hit the plus button, and now you can see, that's another action which has been added.

And maybe the last thing that I'm gonna do in this particular case, is I'm gonna click on Content. So I wanna let my team know that I've got this, or I'm gonna look into this.

So I'm gonna scroll down to this option, which says post comment, and I'm gonna say, "I will look into this." All right, so that is the comment that's gonna be added each time as a part of this rule. Again, I need to hit that plus green button.

And you can see that that has been added as an action.

Testing the New Rule

Now what's really important, don't forget to hit Save at this point, because if I was to hit X, all of this is going to go away. Don't hit Cancel, unless you don't want this rule anymore, but make sure you remember to hit Save.

So after hitting Save, you can see that we have this new rule. It tries to spell it out for us, so we can come back and review it, and edit it if we need to. But this is the rule that we've just created.

Let's close this and see if it actually works. So here I am in the Ideas list, that's where we set up the rule. I'm gonna say add another card, and I'm gonna say, "Create a new product." All right, so I'm gonna hit Enter on my keyboard, and what's gonna happen? There we go! We've got the new due date, that's 48 hours from today. We've got the comment, we'll go look at that in a second. And, it has attached myself to the card. I haven't done anything else. I haven't even clicked within the card yet, and it's automatically applied those three actions. If I open up the card and I scroll down, there's that comment we specified. "I will look into this." So we've added three actions just by adding a card to this particular list.

There are so many possibilities here within Butler. That was just a quick example to get you comfortable with the interface. Now, choosing the different options is going to be very similar for the other four ways in which you can apply Butler to your Trello boards.

So let's just go through how you might use some of these different options.

Under Card Buttons, Butler gives you the opportunity to actually add a custom button within the card that can perform, well, almost any action or multiple actions that you want. So in this case, I've added a card button that's called Move Up, and it will move the card to the top of this list, the To Do list.

So let's see if it works, and where you will find it. So here's my To Do list, I'm gonna click on the bottom card here, the one that is last in this list, and you will see under the Power-Ups menu, here is my custom Butler button. If I select Move Up, you're probably not gonna notice much of anything here, because we're already within the card, but if I close it, you can see it automatically moved that card to the very top of the list. Great stuff!

Now one thing you should know is that when it comes to Card Buttons, you cannot specify them to a particular list. A Card Button, if I go anywhere, you're gonna see this Move Up button. So if I was to click this right now, it's gonna also move it, it's not just gonna bring it up to the top of this list, because we said move it to the top of the To Do list. So that's how Card Buttons work.

Now the Board Button is somewhat similar, but you will see that the Board Button applies to everything on the board. Here right beside the Butler button is a board button, which I have previously created. It's called Move Approved. And here's how this button works, or how I've created this particular button. "Move each card with the green 'New project' label in the list 'Ideas' to the list 'Projects'."

So you might wanna use a board button when it's something you want to initiate at a given time. I'll show you in a minute how you can initiate things based on a calendar date. But let's say over here, I'm gonna add a label to just a couple of these. Let's add a label to the first and last one here. So maybe, this is where the ideas start, and after a while, anything that gets this green new project label, I wanna move it up over here.

But what if I have a long list of these? I don't wanna do it one at a time. That's why I've got my Move Approved button. So let me click that button here. You'll see it down below. Sometimes it'll be a quick screen, Butler telling you what's happening. (gasps) Oh, they're gone. Those cards have been moved from the Ideas list, and here they are at the bottom of my Projects list. Exactly what I wanted it to happen by using that board button.

Let's go back into Butler and look at the last two options here. Now it's hard to give them an example because they're both date-related.

The first one is a Calendar Command, and what this has to do with is when you want something to perform on a particular day of the week, or day of the month, something that's gonna happen on a regular basis. So in this example, I've created a calendar event that says, "Every month on the 1st, archive all the cards in the list 'Complete'." And this is probably a pretty good example, because for many of us, often we will have a complete, or a finished, or a done list, and this just accumulates a large number of cards. So maybe once in a while, you want Butler to automatically archive those cards. Well, on the first of the month, that's exactly what's gonna happen here. Everything in this list is going to be archived. And of course, you choose the timeframe, you create the buttons, you create how you want to customize that rule.

Last but not least, we have Due Date. And this is different than Calendar because it's basing everything on the due date of the card. So in this example rule, I've created something that says, "On the Sunday before a card is due, add the red 'Urgent' label to the card." So that means every weekend, before a card is due, it's gonna add this red Urgent label, only to those cards that have a due date in that coming week.

I'd love to hear from you next. What types of automation will you be creating, and how much time is this gonna be saving you? Because ever since I've started using Butler, I have saved so much time working with others and working within my Trello boards. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Today's video is sponsored by Deepstash. Deepstash is the app that breaks down articles into bite-sized pieces so you only get the good stuff. Don't have time to read a 900-word blog post? Let Deepstash provide you with a summary and key points so you can learn more and remember what's most important. Whether you love self-improvement, time management, or any other topic, try Deepstash for yourself. Available now on the App Store and Google Play.

Are you frustrated with the ability to organize all of your notes within Google Keep? Or perhaps you're relatively new to Keep Notes and you don't fully understand the power of labels, reminders, and notes.

Well, in today's video, I want to show you how to get so much more out of Google Keep, and it all starts with archive. One of the most frustrating things with Google Keep is that every new note you create ends up here on the note home screen or the note home page. Even if you add labels, you can see that all of my notes here—I've got things like work, family, volunteer, personal—they're all labeled, but they all remain here on the home screen. Yes, I can go over here to the left and click on family, and there's my family note, but I don't necessarily want it in two places. I don't want it amongst dozens and dozens, maybe even hundreds of notes here on the Google Keep home screen.

Well, in order to clean this area up and make it more manageable, what we're going to do is start archiving some of our notes. Now here's a quick keyboard shortcut for you. If you'd like to archive your notes quickly and easily, all you need to do is select the E key on your keyboard.

So for this first one here, I'm gonna hit the E key, I'm gonna hover over it, and I'm going to hit E on my keyboard, and there it goes into archive. I'm going to take this next one, hover over E, I'm gonna hit this one, hit E. It's immediately gonna go into archive.

Now you might be saying to yourself, "Scott, I still want to search for these notes. I still want to interact with these notes." No worries. They haven't been deleted. They haven't gone away. Yes, you can click on the archive folder and see where they are, but if we look at this new office design, for example, it's labeled work. I can go to my work label and it's still there. It tells me it's in the archive, but it's still there.

Let's go back to that notes home screen for an example. I'm gonna hit E here, here, and here. Now my note screen is completely free for new notes. I can use this for processing new information. Maybe I only want to use this area for things that are due or things that I'm working on, but I can now go to my labels and all of my notes are still there. They're labeled under archive, but it has kept my notes area nice and clean.

Now we want to combine this with using reminders. Something that often a lot of people don't get as much out of when they're first using, or even if they've been using Keep for some time. So I want to take a look at an example that I set up earlier today. So this is a note. It's called review customer contract. I gave it the label work. Remember, you can use a hashtag if you want to add that label quicker than just selecting the drop-down menu here as well.

Now I'm actually gonna unarchive this because this is gonna give you an example of how this really works. You can see that at the reminder here—I set a reminder for earlier today. So this one is actually already been triggered. It's already been fired, and as a result, although it was still in archive because it had a reminder, it graduated here into my notes workspace.

Let me give you a closer example of how this works. If I go into reminders, you can see that that's not the only one that has a reminder. It's the only one that's been fired. It's the only one that's been triggered, but I've got a couple of other notes here that are due soon.

So this red one, for example. I've got a reminder for later today at 8 p.m. So if I go to my notes home screen, you can see that I've just got the one note here at the moment, but this is what's going to happen. As soon as 8 p.m. comes along, not only is this one going to move up here to the fired section within reminders, but this note is also going to appear here on my notes home screen. It's gonna appear here in due date order, right up at the front. So I can deal with it, I can review it, I can check it off. Whatever that note represents, it won't get lost. I won't have to click on reminders. I won't have to go and find it under my family label. It's going to automatically come here into the notes section, just like this work note did earlier at 10:15 a.m.

And remember, if you have desktop notifications enabled, you'll also receive a notification here on the desktop version. If you have your notifications set up on mobile, you'll also receive a notification there as well.

So let's go back to our labels 'cause I want to show you something else that may be helpful to you. You'll notice that these labels are always listed in alphabetical order. And if you have a small number of labels, like you see here, that might be okay. It's pretty easy for me to find these different labels. But what if you have many, many more? What if you have 10+? You obviously work with some labels more often than others, so here's a very quick but simple trick to help you reorder your labels.

Under edit labels what we can do is that we can put a number in front of the labels that we would like to order in a particular way. So let's say I use work more often than anything else. I'm gonna put a one in front of that. And let's say I would like my personal label to be next. So I'm gonna put a number two beside that. You don't necessarily have to number every one of your labels, but maybe there's just a few that you'd like to keep at the top of the list. I'm gonna hit done, and now you can see those labels will always appear at the beginning of this list.

So if you want to clean up your notes home screen, I would encourage you to start using the archive function. Yes, that means archiving almost every single note. Once you've decided what to do with it, set a reminder as to when you would like it to reappear. You can keep your note screen nice and clean. And remember, when that reminder is triggered, when that time comes across, it's going to graduate, not only here to the fired area, but it's also going to appear here in your notes area.

I hope you enjoyed today's video. If you have further questions or suggestions for future videos about Google Keep or other productivity tools, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. As always, I want you to remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Why Google Forms is so valuable

You may already be familiar with some of Google Drive's more popular tools such as Docs, Sheets, or Slides, but if you come down to the More option, you'll find perhaps one of the most powerful tools here within Drive, and that is Google Forms.

So in today's video, I wanna show you everything you need to know about creating forms, surveys, or participant feedback right here from within Google.

Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress, and if we select Google Forms, it's going to open up a brand new form for us.

How to access Google Forms

to start working with, so let's get started. Here's our untitled form and probably the first thing that you want to do is give your form or your survey or whatever, you're going to use this form for a title.

Add Title and Description to Google Form

So let's just call this one form number one, let's keep it nice and simple. Now below, you also have an option to add a description. Now, this is not a requirement, but sometimes it can be helpful to add a brief description just to let the survey participant or whoever is going to be accessing this form, you know why you would like them to fill this out?

Adding and Editing Questions

NNow down below, you will have an initial question already pre-populated. It's just titled Untitled Question, and we've got Option One number here.

So let's start with an easy one. Let's start with "What is your name?" right?

And the great thing about Google Forms is that you may have noticed that that multiple-choice option which was here just a moment ago has actually changed because Google Forms assumed that I was asking a short answer question. It actually automatically made that change for me, which is great because this is exactly what I'm looking for. I just want a short text box so people can enter in their name.

Now, of course, there's a wide variety of questions.

Different Question Types in Google Forms

In which we can ask including both short-answer and long-answer, such as a paragraph, multiple choice, checkboxes, and dropdown are among some of the most popular options, especially because it's so easy for the participant to fill things out.

Another great option within Google Forms is you can actually allow users to upload a file if you want them to send you a screenshot or upload a PDF. Maybe you need them to sign a contract or sign a permission form; you can do that here with file upload.

Then there's a few different scales and grids: a linear scale, you're probably used to seeing this, usually like a five-point scale, something like never, rarely, sometimes, often, and all the time; a multiple-choice grid; a checkbox grid. You can also allow them to choose a date or time.

We're not gonna go through every single option here, but I encourage you to experiment and use these different options as a part of your form.

So for this first question, "What is your name?" we want it to be a short answer; that's great. Let's take a quick look at some of the other options.

Changing Question Options

That are available to us here.

Here, we can duplicate this question. This is very helpful if you have something like a multiple-choice answer field, and maybe the answers are going to be the same for another question, so you can just easily duplicate that question.

Here we can delete this question if we need to, and then we have something that's called "Required." There may be some questions within your form that you want to force the user to respond to. So by selecting this slider, they will not be able to submit the form until they answer this question, or any other question that you may have selected this slider for.

All right, now that we've got our first question here, let's add a few more. To do that, we wanna go over to the right and we've got this sort of floating menu here, and we wanna hit the plus button. That's gonna add a new question. So let's add a multiple-choice question this time around.

Adding a Multiple Choice Question

How is your day going so far?

Alright, so option number one, maybe I wanna say, "It's great," you know, that's one option. If I wanna give them another option, go down to number two, "It's okay," and maybe a third option, I'm gonna say, "It's been a bad day."

Alright, so I've got three multiple-choice options here. I can continue to add as many options as I'd like, but you'll also notice that there's an "Add other" option, and you're probably used to seeing this in other forms as well. I can add an "Other" option so that if they don't relate to any of the choices given here, they can write in their own option. That can be very helpful. It may just depend on the type of question that you're asking.

Now, if you want to remove any of these questions, you simply just need to choose the X over here on the side. There, I've gotten rid of my other question. You can also rearrange your questions. You can see the six little dots. If I want the "Okay" option to be first, I can put that at the top, and maybe "It's been a bad day," I want that as the second option. I can move them in any order that I like.

You'll also notice that there's a little image icon here to the right as well.

Adding Images to a Question

Depending on the type of question you choose, such as multiple choice, you can add an image to these answers. So maybe I want a great big happy face beside "Great." Maybe I want a sad face beside "It's been a bad day." Or maybe, depending on my question, maybe the question is something like, "Hey, which of these pictures do you like the most?" or "Which of these logos do you think our company should use?" You don't even have to have any text; you could just have them as an image-based answer for the participant to choose.

Alright, let's maybe add—let's keep with the hover area here because there's a few more options we can use as well. The second choice here is to import questions. So this is great if you've already created some forms within Google Forms, maybe you want to repurpose some questions, particularly some complicated questions that you've used in the past. Here, I've got some other forms, I could import existing questions into this new form.

This one down below is actually not about changing the text or the text size, but it has to do with adding a title and description. Now if I select this, it's not going to replace the title at the top of the screen, but maybe you'd like to add a title or some additional description further on in your survey. So if I select this, you can see I've got a new section here. I'm just gonna say, "Keep going," and I can add a description if I want, "Don't give up." Or maybe you just wanna tell people what's happening in the next part of the section. If you wanna add a little more detail, but it's not exactly a question, you can do that by adding a title here.

I'm just gonna get rid of this by selecting "Delete."

Adding Images or Video to Google Forms

In this particular example, you also see the ability to add an image or add a video.

Let's maybe add an image just as a quick example. You can either upload an image from your device, take a snapshot if you know the URL, or look at some of your files within your albums or within your Google Drive.

So if I choose an image to upload here, I'm just gonna see if I can find something, something quick. Let's do this one, this bunch of Google Apps here. It's gonna upload that image and then insert it directly into my form.

Now you'll notice this is not a type of question. I can't add a question on top of this, but the way where this image or adding a video may be helpful is that if you have a set of questions relating to this afterwards. So you could tell them here, "The next three questions or the next few questions relate to this image," or "Look at this image carefully, and then answer the next few questions." And so they can always use this as a reference.

Adding a Section to Google Forms

The last thing that we wanna see here is that we can add a new section within Google Forms. So if I choose this option, you can see that it's created some separation. Now I've got Section 1 of 2 for the first couple of questions that I've created, and I can create a whole new section here.

Now this can be very valuable if you are wanting to break up a very lengthy form. A really good rule of thumb is to limit about maybe four or five or maybe six questions at most per page, and then force the user to click "Next" or to move on to another section. The reason being is that sometimes when people open up your survey, or your form, or your feedback, whatever you're using this form for, if they see, you know, 27 questions or a very, very long list, they might give up before they even begin. So breaking it up into sections can be very, very helpful.

Here's our new section, and I'm gonna actually add just one quick, quick sample question here. Just say, "Option one, option two, option three," just so we can use it in our preview, just so you can see what this looks like with the different sections.

Now before we see the preview,

Changing the Google Form Theme

Let's take a look at customizing the theme here within our survey. Up here at the top, you'll see that there's this "Customize Theme" palette, and if we select this, we've got a few different choices.

We can choose an image for the header section for the beginning of our quiz or our form. I've got an example over here—something very colorful. But of course, this could be your logo, it could be a brand name, or a title of the survey that you can add at the top of that survey.

You can also quickly change the theme color. So if I'm doing something for Simpletivity, well maybe I want something a little more blue in my theme or maybe I want something a little more bright, like this orange.

I can also change the background color, if I want it to be all white or if I want more of a contrast between the questions and what's going on behind the screen.

Our last choice is to change the font style. However, I would be careful about this. They've got this decorative text here and a few others that often make it a little more difficult to read. I would recommend that you either keep it basic or choose something that's very easy for your participants to read.

So you can change your theme here as well. Okay, now that we're happy with the theme, we've got sort of the basis of our quiz or our form here.

Previewing the Google Form

Let's take a preview, and here we have this little eyeball. If we click "Preview" in a new tab, it's gonna open up our form. So here is Section Number One. Remember, we only had a few questions here, right? So I can say my name is Scott. My day's been, you know, it's going pretty great today. I'm gonna select my last option there.

And now you can see I've got a "Next" button because I still have another question to go, right? So if I select "Next," I can go over here, and here is that additional question as well.

So this gives you a feel for what users are going to see. This is actually the exact same thing that they are going to see when you share this form with others. But there's one careful note here: If you hit "Submit," if I hit "Submit" right now, it is actually going to add this information to the results of this form.

So be careful; this is actually more than just a preview. It's actually a really, it's a real live link to your form. So not only does it show you how it's going to behave, but if you hit "Submit," it may skew your data, depending on what you're using your form for.

So I'm gonna close this one off, yes, I'm gonna leave this. Let's go back to our form as well, and let's take a look at our settings.

Editing Google Form Settings

Just before we send this out to our participants, what other settings are available to us?

Well, here under "General," we do have the choice to collect email addresses if we want to force users to submit an email address. And then, of course, they can choose to get a response receipt as well if you want to send them their responses, making sure that they've been submitted correctly.

You can also require users to sign in, and this will limit them to respond only once per email address. So this can be helpful if you don't want someone to, you know, repeat and continue to submit into that form time and time again. However, this can also sometimes be a barrier, right? And if you don't want people to have additional steps in filling out your form.

Lastly, you can choose if you want respondents to edit their submission afterwards, or if you want to allow them to see a summary chart or text responses afterwards as well.

Now, there are two other options here as well. Under "Presentation," we can choose to show a progress bar, so as you're looking at the different sections, you can let them know, "Oh, you're 33% of the way complete," or "You're 67% of the way complete," depending on how many sections you've set up.

You can choose to shuffle the question order. Now, you wanna be careful with this as well because this is going to shuffle up all of your questions within your form. So just be careful if this is a necessity or not for you.

The last one, and this one is checked by default, is "Show a link to submit another response." If you don't want people to submit multiple times, sometimes you can leave this unchecked, and then uncheck this one so they don't submit another response.

Last but not least, you can customize your confirmation message, you know, thanking them and letting them know that their form has been submitted.

Converting Form to a Quiz

The last one here has to do with quizzes, and I'm just gonna give you a very brief overview. If you are a teacher or an instructor, you can choose to make this form a quiz, and that allows you to actually grade the quiz as the individual goes through the questions. You can highlight missed questions.

Again, not for everyone, but there are some powerful tools here within the Settings window.

Alright, now that we've adjusted our theme, we've taken a look at the preview, we've adjusted our settings, let's send this form out.

How to Send a Google Form

And we're gonna select the "Send" button here, and we've got a few different ways in which we can do so. Again, we've got the choice here to collect email addresses if we want. From this screen, you can actually send that email directly from this dialog. You can just copy and paste your email addresses, and you can adjust the subject and the message if you want.

But I think perhaps the most popular way of sharing a form is via a link. So here's your unique link that you can copy and paste. You can put it within an email, you can put it in social media. It even allows you to shorten that URL if you like, as well. So you can copy and paste this and put it wherever you like.

Our last choice here is if we want to embed this in the form of HTML. So if you want to put this on a web page on a website, you can do so as well by copying this and pasting it within your HTML editor.

Viewing Responses in Google Forms

All right, well, last but not least, now that we've sent out our form, let's take a look at our responses. To view your responses, you can see that there is actually a second tab to the right of "Questions."

Now, for this form that we've just created, we don't have any responses. But I do have another sample that I want to show you. Here's the one that I showed you earlier with the header, and we've got three responses.

So if we click on the "Responses" tab, you can see a summary of all of our answers. For this multiple choice question here, what did they write? This was a short-answer question, so here are our three different responses. And then I asked them, "What date is it today?" and they all gave different dates, so I think only one of them was correct.

Now, this is the summary view. You can also view this by question. So if I just want to look at that first question, I can see all of the answers here. I can toggle to the next question, it shows me what the question is, and I can see what the responses are.

Lastly, I can actually look at the individual responses. So by choosing this option, I can dive down deeper and say, "Okay, well, what did Participant One say overall?" He or she said "Yes," and then this date. So depending on what you're after, you can drill down a little bit deeper.

You'll also want to know that within the "Responses" tab, this is where you toggle responses on or off. So if I turn this off, I can safely edit things and know that no one is going to be able to respond at that time. But be careful because anyone who has the existing link is not going to be able to access or submit those responses.

Viewing Responses in Google Sheets

So you can toggle that here.

The last thing I want to show within the "Responses" menu has to do with this little Google Sheets icon. This allows you to view your responses in Google Sheets.

So up here, this is exactly what it looks like. We still have all the same responses that we saw on the previous screen. It includes a little timestamp showing us when that person submitted that survey. But the great thing here is that you can take this information and manipulate it in so many other different ways, creating graphs, creating charts, or maybe you just prefer a spreadsheet view.

So in order to do so, you can just click this little icon here and view them within your responses.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this video about an overview of Google Forms. Remember, you can use this in so many different ways. Do you want to submit questions for a survey? Do you want to use it as a contact form on your website? Or maybe a permission form where people have to submit information to you? You can do it all right here within Google Forms.

Have additional questions? Let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Have you sat down to your computer focused on your most important project for the day, and said to yourself something like, okay, we need to get this done by the end of today?

Let's just focus on this for the next hour, and we're gonna have a fantastic day, and before you know it, a few minutes later, you find yourself wandering on YouTube or maybe social media or some other website that is distracting you or pulling you away from your most important work?

Well, in today's video, I wanna introduce you to Cold Turkey Blocker, a website and application blocker, to help you combat all of those distractions.

Hello, everyone! Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And Cold Turkey Blocker may just be the most effective and hard blocker to beat so you can focus on that most important task.

So let's take a look. Here we are within the Cold Turkey Blocker dashboard. And Cold Turkey is actually an application that you install on your computer, on your device. It's available for both PC and Macs, and also mobile devices.

And the great thing about that is that you can actually block applications, more than just websites. But today, we're gonna be looking at probably the number one culprit for most of us, and that is websites.

So to get started, what you're gonna need to do is either create a new block list, or we can use the default block list in which Cold Turkey comes with. So you have about 54 sites here in this default list called Distractions.

I'm just gonna click Edit here so you can see what's going on within this list. So if I scroll through here, you can see here's the 50 plus websites. We've got all of the major social media websites. We've got a lot of video, including Netflix and YouTube, and a lot of entertainments, and I think a lot of funny websites in this list, as well.

Now, of course, you can add to this list at any time. You can just type in the URL here at the top. Or you can make your own, as well. Here, I've created one called No Video. It's pretty simple. All it has is Netflix or YouTube.

If I wanna create a new block list, I just have Add block list to the top left. I'm gonna call this one, let's just call this one Social. Let's spell it right, Social Media. And then I can just, again, I can just start typing in what social media websites. I'm gonna add Facebook. I'm gonna add Twitter. I'm gonna add LinkedIn.

Although it is business related, sometimes we can get lost on LinkedIn, as well. And I can always edit this over time. You can also import other lists. Because I know there's some great websites that have some great lists of their own, but what I like to do. You probably only have a good handful of websites that you know you are tempted to visit more often than you should.

So you might wanna just start with a list of maybe half a dozen, to 10 or 12 that you know are your biggest culprits and add them to a list. I can hit Save, and now I've got my block list here.

The next thing that we wanna do is we wanna go over to timers. So here you can see the different lists that we've created. And I'm gonna do a quick example here. So I'm gonna use the Distractions list. I'm gonna use that big list there. All you need to do is say when do you want to block all of these websites until.

So I'm gonna pick today, and I'm just gonna do it for a couple of minutes here. So I'm gonna say 10:30. Now you choose breaks if you like. Here, you've got a few different defaults here. Sprint A, B, and C, and Allowance A and B. I'm gonna show you more details about that a little later on. So I'm gonna say None for the time being.

And last but not least, when we're ready to go, we can hit Start, or we can turn this to On. Now you're gonna get a warning here. It's gonna say, "Are you sure you want to block 'Distractions' for about six minutes? "This action cannot be reversed "if 'lock timers' is enabled."

Now you can go into settings and change this default, but I think this is exactly what makes Cold Turkey such an effective blocker is because you can't skirt around it, right? If you need distraction-free time, you wanna make it extremely difficult if not impossible for you to go to that website or to go to those social media or video or whatever that website is and take you away from your most important goal.

So I'm gonna say, yeah, I'm sure. I wanna be distraction free. So now if I go to the internet, and look, I've already got YouTube pulled up here. I'm gonna go to that YouTube tab, and, oh, Vince Carter docs, let's go, oh. Nope, I've been blocked by Cold Turkey.

And Cold Turkey will even give me a bit of an inspirational quote: "Your time is limited, "so don't waste it living someone else's life." Okay, what about Twitter? What if I wanna go to Twitter? I wanna click on something here, and, oh, nope. Cold Turkey again. And I've got my inspirational quote here by Mark Twain.

You may think that this is kind of cheesy, adding these different quotes here when you reach a site which has been blocked, but sometimes it can stop and make you think about, oh, yeah. This is the most important thing I should be working on. I should really be coming back to this report. This needs to be done today. I need to be head-down.

Now you're probably thinking how can I work my way around this? Well, how about incognito mode? Yeah, let's go into private browsing. There's no way it's going to skirt around private browsing. Let's go to Facebook.com, and (groans) even in private browsing. "It doesn't matter how slowly you go "as long as you do not stop."

So this again, I think is one of the great things about Cold Turkey is that it's gonna block you even in private mode. It's gonna force you to get back or really strongly encourage you to get back to that task that you need to do.

So let's go back into the interface. This block is still on. It's still gonna remain on for a few more minutes, and I'm gonna show you what happens when the block is over. But until then, I wanna show you some of the other features here within Cold Turkey.

There is a scheduling feature. So if you want to have distraction-free time at certain points of the day, you can build that right into your schedule. So here, I've got a few different blocks here where I want to be distraction free. Let's say I wanna add in another one.

Maybe I wanna do some head-down writing tomorrow, let's say early tomorrow morning. So I'm gonna say 7:00 a.m., just click and drag. I'm gonna say 7:00 to about nine o'clock, about there. When I let go, I can see this little dialog. I can adjust the time here.

And here I can choose which distraction list, right? So do I want the bulk, the 54 site distraction list, or is it really video that hurts me the most in the morning? So why don't I say No Video at that time. We're gonna leave Breaks alone for now, and I'm gonna hit Save.

So now automatically, I don't have to start a timer. I don't have to initiate anything. I'm gonna have those particular sites blocked during that time tomorrow. And this is such a simple interface. I like the way they've designed it here is that this is going to be your weekly schedule.

So you can adjust it over time, but for many of us, you may have a certain routine or a certain time of the week where you really need that distraction-free time, you can build that in here as a part of the schedule.

Okay, let's get back to breaks. Under Settings is where we can edit our breaks. And there are two different types. There's our Daily Allowance, and then there's our Sprints down below. So the Daily Allowance, it gives you two different options.

Allowance A or Allowance B. Let's say you want to allow yourself 20 minutes of free time, or Allowance B I've got set here currently for 60 minutes, so you're allowed a certain amount of time to go to those websites to watch videos, to browse, and to contribute on social media. However, when that time is up, it's going to block those particular websites.

Sprints work a little bit differently. And if you think of the Pomodoro Technique, you can choose how long you want to work and then how long you want your break to be. So, of course, during the work time, you're not gonna be able to access those websites and those applications, but you will get a few minutes break if you need to get away and you want to watch a YouTube video such as this one right now.

The one other area that I wanna show you here in part of the interface is statistics. Cold Turkey does provide some high-level statistics here as to your top five apps that you have been using and the top five websites that you are visiting.

Now this isn't very granular. In fact, it's pretty basic stuff that it's showing you here in terms of those websites and the amount of time that you're spending there. But you might be able to see a bit of a theme over time.

Alright, so there we have the little announcement here on the bottom right-hand corner: Well Done! Your time block named "Distractions" is now over. So you will get a similar notification on your desktop when that distraction-free time is done.

Now you can adjust these notifications if you like. But it can be helpful if you're looking forward to that break and if you need to get away from that important task or that most important to-do, and do something a little more frivolous, maybe something a little more entertaining.

If you'd like to learn more about Cold Turkey, you can go to GetColdTurkey.com and try all of these features for free. There is a basic version, which gives you all of the website-blocking functionality, and if you'd like to block even other things such as applications and games on your computer, well, you can upgrade to the pro version and do that, as well.

Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.‍

What is the best mind mapping tool for you and your needs?

Well in today's video, we are taking a look at two very popular mind mapping tools, Mindomo and MindMeister, and I'm gonna pick an overall winner.

Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity Scott Friesen helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress, and in today's video, I'm gonna be using five different criteria to rate these two very popular mind mapping tools.

Let's get started with criteria number one, and that has to do with viewing options.

Viewing Options

We're gonna kick things off with MindMeister, and as you can see, MindMeister is a very simple interface, a very easy-to-use interface, but one of the drawbacks is that this is the only view that we have of what's going on here within our mind map.

Now, if you want to upgrade to a task management suite, MindMeister does have a separate app, but it is something that you will have to connect.

There's nothing that is built right into the interface.

You're essentially stuck with the mind map or mind web interface.

Now, if we go over to Mindomo, one of the great things is the multiple views that we have available.

First off, let's take a look at the outline view within Mindomo.

What this does is it breaks out a bulleted point list, but one of the great things here is that not only can you add checkboxes to a number of your tasks or really any bubble or any thought that you want, you can check them off and continue to work directly from this view, but another one that is often requested when you are dealing with mind maps is a Gantt chart view and Mindomo has that built right in.

You can add dependencies, you can change the duration of a certain task or a certain project, whatever your mind map represents, and have all that information available to you right here.

I have to give a clear-cut advantage to Mindomo in this particular category.

Second up is our interface, and let's stick with Mindomo for right now.

Interface and Ease of Use

Mindomo has a very intuitive interface as you're dragging things around, as you're adding new subtopics and subtasks within your interface, it's quite easy to make a style change.

If you click this little down arrow on any one of your objects, you can quickly add a comment, you can change the font, you can change the color, how you want to branch things out, a fairly intuitive interface.

Now, if we go over to MindMeister, one of the nice things is that they have this overlay available to you at all times.

If I need to change the font on this word small, I can easily do that with just a few simple clicks.

I wanna add maybe a greenish color here, maybe a smiley face or a checkmark or remove, let's keep the checkmark and let's remove the smiley face, I can easily do that with this interface here.

Now, I would say this one probably comes down to personal preference in terms of how you like to work.

In this case, I'm gonna give it an even draw between the two products.

For those who may want fewer options available to you but like this colorful window, you may prefer MindMeister, but for those who maybe like a bit more of a sleeker look, you might have the advantage with Mindomo.

Our third criteria has to do with adding notes because when you think of a mind map,

Note Editing

you often are thinking of a high-level view.

You can see that most of the things that I have added in this particular project, they're single words or something usually a little less than just a few words, but we wanna add further details.

Here you can see that I have a note beside this one listed Reading Material, and you can add an awful lot of detailed information, you can even do some rich formatting here, as well.

If you want to insert a link or a picture or a video, you can do that here, as well.

But one of the things that I did not like about the note feature here within Mindomo is that if I click on this, I can't click on it again and then hide it.

Yeah, I can hover over this or click on it and get a preview of this, but if I go to this second item or something else on my screen, I actually have to come up here and close this window or if I'm changing between two different things on the screen.

Conversely, if we go over here to MindMeister, here's something that I have with a note and I can hover over it and get the note, as well, but again, this is, I think, one of the advantages of having this hover or floating menu here.

If I need to add something to this Cookbook note, here is a note, I can quickly do that and then move on with something else and it's not interfering with my view.

Now, you may be asking yourself, well Scott, I didn't see all the same viewing options here as I saw in Mindomo.

Well, if you click on Advanced, you actually will get a very similar view.

Here you've got indentation and text size, many of the same things that we saw in Mindomo.

It's clear, it's straightforward if you need that.

Otherwise, you can just have this simple text box here down below.

Personally, I prefer this.

I'm gonna give the advantage to MindMeister when it comes to adding additional details and, in particular, adding new notes.

Now, the fourth criteria is most important when dealing with mind mapping software and that is collaborating with others.

Collaboration

I'm gonna give you this warning now, don't even entertain a mind mapping tool that does not allow you to share or collaborate with others.

Of course, both of these tools do.

If I come down below, you can see that I'm already sharing this with one person.

It's gonna show me the details of that individual and I can change things if I want to allow them to edit or maybe I only want them to view, and it's pretty easy and straightforward to add a link if I wanna add other members, as well.

Now, you can add comments to any of your objects within your mind map.

You can actually have a conversation with other people within your mind map.

Now if we go over here to Mindomo, you can see that I have been attached, I've got my initials, SF, here to a few different projects.

I can quickly unassign myself if I need to or assign someone else on my team if I need to, as well.

The other great thing with this collaboration assignment is I can use the search bar at the top of the screen and I can filter by those whom it's assigned to.

Maybe I just wanna take a look at the things that I'm assigned to, great, everything else is minimized and I can just focus on that task.

What about what my teammate is assigned to? Great, it's quick, it's easy.

You can also filter by other things, such as due date.

Remember that Gantt chart view and remember how we can use this like a task list?

You can do that, as well.

This search bar is a lot more powerful than just the text-based search bar that you may be used to.

When it comes to collaboration, I have to give a significant edge here to Mindomo.

Last but not least, let's take a look at access and the different apps available.

Apps and Access

Now, MindMeister has both an excellent iOS and Android app, so you can keep the collaboration going even when you are on the go.

Mindomo also has an app for both iOS and Android, but they do go one step further and that is with a desktop version.

If you need to be working offline, if you don't have access to the internet, you can keep working and then sync back to your original version or sync up with your online version.

This even works with collaboration, as well.

This is also very helpful for those who may just enjoy working in a standalone desktop app and not always working within a browser.

So yes, I'm gonna have to give the advantage here to Mindomo.

Overall, if you're looking for an excellent mind mapping tool, you can't really go wrong with either Mindomo or MindMeister, but for my money and for the features and the functionality in which I'm getting, I have to give the win to Mindomo.

What do you think?

Have you used either of these tools before?

Which would you pick in this showdown?

Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.

In fact, it's very simple.‍